March 3, 2026

AND AGAIN: Israel bombs Iran’s top mullahs as they count votes for next supreme leader.

The Israeli air force struck a top Iranian meeting on Tuesday where Tehran’s senior clerics had gathered to select a replacement for slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to multiple reports.

The Assembly of Experts, made up of 88 top clerics, were together in the holy city of Qom when an airstrike hit their building overnight, the Times of Israel reported.

The strike came just as the mullahs were counting the votes to appoint the next supreme leader, according to Fox News.

It remains unclear how many members of the assembly were attending the vote when the building was hit.

Unverified video and pictures from Qom allegedly show the building that housed the Iranian leaders in complete ruins following the blast.

The strike came just as the Israeli air force deployed around 100 fighter jets to drop more than 250 bombs on a “leadership complex” in Tehran, located north of Qom.

Faster, please:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMM:

They must feel at least some sense of safety against the Mullahs’ security forces. That right there is a yuge change.

Posted at 12:27 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S AMAZING HOW LONG TEHRAN HAS GONE WITHOUT FEELING KARMA, AND HOW WILLING THE LEFT IS TO FORGET THAT:

I’m kidding about the second part. There’s nothing amazing about anything awful the Left does or says.

Posted at 11:56 am by Stephen Green

VDH: Trump’s Way of War.

Has President Trump introduced a novel way of waging Western war against America’s foreign enemies?

We saw glimpses of it during his first term, when he eliminated Iranian general and terrorist kingpin Qassem Soleimani and ISIS terrorist grandee Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In the former case, he preferred hitting the cause rather than the effects of Iranian terrorism in Syria and Iraq, while making it clear that he had no intention of striking the Iranian mainland and entering into a tit-for-tat “forever war.”

In large part, he was successful. Iran never quite replaced the venomous Soleimani. And despite tired threats, its performative art responses did not kill any Americans, and they were seen by Trump as venting and not worth a counterresponse.

In the case of the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump likewise went after the catalyst of ISIS terrorism. But he also bombed ISIS into near nonexistence in Iraq, since, unlike Iran, it lacked the financial and material resources of a state sponsor of terror, and it had no independent ability to make weapons or finance its terrorism.

In 2018, Trump probably killed more Russian ground troops (more than 200?) than America had during the entire Cold War, with his furious response to the Wagner Group assault on a U.S. Special Operations base near Khasham, Syria. Yet the defeat of Russian mercenaries also led to no wider conflict.

In these three cases, Trump successfully portrayed his antagonists as the unprovoked aggressors, employed overwhelming force to eliminate them, and declared them one-off occurrences with no need to punish the ultimate source or sponsor of the aggression with further force, and he was largely successful in limiting subsequent attacks on American installations.

In Trump’s second term, he widened his doctrine of “preventative deterrence” with operations to remove Venezuelan communist strongman Nicolás Maduro, along with two separate bombing campaigns against Iran.

While the second Iran operation is now in progress, it may resemble the earlier two in a number of facets.

There’s nothing novel about America waging punitive expeditions, going all the way back to the Jefferson administration.

Trump merely revived a lost art, and well.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green

MERDE:

Not antiwar, just on the other side, to coin an Instaphrase.

Posted at 11:25 am by Stephen Green

EAST BOUND AND DOWN:

Well, that’s one way to price the new risks.

Posted at 10:54 am by Stephen Green

HMM: Paramount Won’t Sell Cable Networks After WBD Merger, Touts ‘Incredible Footprint’ Of Combined Linear Business.

“We believe in the assets we’re buying, and there’s no plans to divest or spin off a package of cable assets at this time. And, in particular, we actually think, given the brands that Warner Bros. is bringing to Paramount, there are a lot of opportunities to think about all the different aspects of what they can do, both on the linear side and the digital side … So that’s our plan right now,” said Gordon.

Expressed another way: “We believe that many of our linear channels have incredible brand that can be reinvigorated for a streaming and digital world.”

Pressed on whether there were any assets at all that feel non-core and could be divested to reduce leverage, he said, “No. Very simply, we have no divestitures planned at this time.”

Comcast recently spun out most NBCUniversal cable networks into a new stand-alone public company called Versant. WBD was planning to do the same in its previous agreement with Netflix by separating its programming assets into another company called Discovery Global.

The deal Netflix inked with WBD last December was just for the Warner Bros studios and streaming assets. Warner terminated that deal last week after receiving a superior offer from Paramount, which is buying WBD in its entirety.

Maybe there’s some life left in cable… or maybe Paramount has other plans for its new cable properties.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green

A LOOK AT THE LIKELY NEAR FUTURE:

Posted at 10:11 am by Glenn Reynolds